Greenwashing

One of our local radio stations has been pitching itself as green lately, and apparently Home Depot thinks that lawnmowers are good for us (Times subscription req'd - sorry). So I haven't really talked about our cabin as "green" too much - though we've tried to take advantage of some sustainable materials and we've been attentive to energy efficiency. And prefab (arguably) has a claim to being green in its own right.

But I tell you - staining 5000 linear feet of cedar is NOT green. And it doesn't wash off. I feel like a duck with all the water-resistant oils my body has absorbed. But we are (pretty much) done with all of it - a few pieces of trim to stain, but after two full days of sanding and staining we are ready to start getting it up on the house. Back out to the site tomorrow to begin...

Stacks of drying and dried cedar:


Test run (with our fingerprints all over it - that's why you should wait til it dries...):

No thank you

When the slab was poured, there was extra concrete (about a yard, apparently). The driver and our contractor pushed us pretty hard to find uses for it (lining the driveway ditch, filling the carpad, etc.). I guess it's a pain for them to get rid of it. If I'd known ahead of time we could have located a spot for a shed and had footers poured for it, but it wasn't a last second option. So I told them no thanks and take your concrete with you. Craig told me follow the concrete truck out and make sure he didn't just dump it in the woods, and I did, and he didn't.

Anyway, walking around the site yesterday we found this off the side of the driveway:


That is presumably what the concrete guy who poured the foundation walls did with his extra concrete (we weren't there for that pour). So the moral of the story is keep an eye on where your extra concrete ends up, and have a plan for it ahead of time if that makes sense for you.

The Frontier Thesis

Building a cabin in the woods has a romantic appeal to some (This American Life ran a piece this weekend about one family's misadventures). And our accommodations are improving bit by bit. That being said, here's our new kitchen:

Finis

Not really, of course. But now that the set is done, the work of our contractors will quickly wrap up. Utilities need to be connected, septic and backfilling and grading hopefully done next week (electric still a bit away), and a couple of trades need to get in (the items we won't be doing ourselves - rough plumbing, HVAC).

Which means that our work begins in earnest. Yesterday we started staining again. (Because we were getting so much junk from the trees falling down on our newly stained wood, we had decided to wait until we had the house set to stain the rest of the cedar so we could let it dry indoors and under cover). We built some drying racks and hope to finish by the end of the week.

Letting some air in

I really LOVE how these windows look. It's odd - they have a presence about them when cranked open that you'd think would distract from the transition from inside to outside. Or maybe they're just emphasizing that transition? I don't have a vocabulary for understanding why I react to them the way I do. But it's one of the elements that really drew me to Res4's designs, and I still dig em.

Quiet

By Monday evening everything was gone - all the people and equipment. Craig and I cleaned up a bit. Tried to picture what everything will look like once we restore some of the natural grade. This will surely be a "before" pick in some post down the line:

We needed a crane to set the crane

Not even kidding. We ended up using a 130 ton crane, which took forever to get ready. It required 110,000 lbs of counterweight to lift our house, and the counterweights are huge steel plates of various sizes (5 ton, 8 ton, etc.) that attach to the bottom of the crane. After the crane was up at the top of the hill, the counterweights were carried up in dump trucks. The second crane moved all the counterweights at the staging area down the street.




Then the crane at the top unloaded the trucks (of counterweight, mats and bracing for the crane's arms, the cable and spreader arms for the pick, etc.):


Preparing the spreader arms, drilling holes in the sill of the house, passing the cable through:






Our intrepid film crew declined OSHA-recommended hardhats:


Ready to go:








Watch those toes:


Set and secure on the foundation:


The crane's last job was to turn the trailer around so it could be towed down to the bottom of the driveway (where Simplex will pick it up one of these days and drive it back to Scranton):


Mark, our contractor, recapping the day:

House Set

No attempt at a witty title - I'm too tired. But everything went great. The set was a breeze. Only really took about fifteen minutes to actually lift, move and set the box (and about six hours to set up and break down the crane). I've got lots to post about all the details, but for now here's a little slideshow of what it looked like (Sarah says it makes her kinda seasick, but then she's pregnant).

UPDATE: ACKK! I just realized that the youtube clip uploaded with iPhoto's default slide show music - Pachalbel! Gonna have to fix that...

UPDATED UPDATE: Fixed.

We're gonna be in pictures?

Last week, Joe at Res4 forwarded me an email from David Cook, a producer at the Fine Living TV network, which is filming episodes of a new show to air in the fall called Home Second Home (about, um, second homes). We caught up with each other on Thursday on the phone, and on Friday he had a film crew at our site (filming us standing around in the rain). I think they'll be out again on Monday for the set, which should make for better tv.

Whew!

After a long day of work on Thursday, the house made it to the top of the hill. First they got the panels set:


Then they started pulling the house:


Then we got stuck at the corner:




Finally, after some fraught moments, we got around the turn and up the hill:


We left the house on the high side of the foundation and the crane will pick it from there:


That was supposed to happen this morning, but it rained all night and morning so we called it off. We pay for the crane by the hour, and the better the conditions, the faster it'll go. Back out Monday for the pick and set.

Foundation issues

There are a bunch of inconsistencies b/w the engineered drawings and the as-built version of the foundation. They are not dealbreakers (the dimensions are correct, and it's square), but it's disappointing that the contractor didn't follow the plans and that I didn't catch them.

This is going to get technical (and boring unless you are really interested in the nuts and bolts of this process). After Res4 designs the house, they have a third-party engineer draw structural details to comply with applicable code (no code in Hardy County, WV, but most builders build to BOCA; I don't actually know what code the engineers drew to in our case). The engineers look at shear and lift concerns and make sure the house is up to snuff. With our house, the connections to the foundation present some lift issues (how to keep the house connected to the foundation when wind wants to lift it off). So the engineered plans specify the kinds of connections that are required b/w the house and the foundation: a combination of anchor bolts (which connect the sill plate - the lumber cap on the foundation - to the concrete wall) and straps (which connect the house to the foundation) and other anchor bolts (also house to foundation), the precise deployment of which varies depending on which specific materials the builder uses. In our case, for example, the engineered drawings offer four different sets of specs (specifying frequency and distance) for the anchor bolts to the sill depending on which kind of bolts are used. The anchor bolts for the sill and the corner straps specified on one of the short walls of our house needed to be located and set in the wet concrete of the foundation wall during the pour. Some of the anchor bolts were missed, and the straps were not set.

Res4 noticed this in the pictures I posted on the blog (another great reason for blogging this process - your architect can monitor progress remotely) and contacted me to talk about implications and possible fixes. Most importantly, structurally the house will be fine. We can compensate for the missed straps in the foundation by increasing the number of straps on the exterior (connecting house to foundation). If there were an inspection process, it would probably be a bigger deal - new engineered plans might be req'd and we'd have to wait for approval.

After talking with Res4, I talked with the contractor who is managing the pre-set and set phases for us. His position was that the connections all exceed BOCA (which is what he builds to) and they've already gone above and beyond what is necessary; in his words, "it'd take a hurricane to move this house." That, of course, is not an acceptable answer for deviating from the plans without talking to me, and I told him as much. We talked about the strapping that Res4 recommended as a solution. He said we could do what we want but it's fine as is.

Lots of lessons here. First, as difficult as it is to get your arms around the technical specs of the building process, learn as much as you can. I probably didn't do enough to educate myself about the particular details of the engineered drawings (I knew there were connections called for at the corners, and didn't know better that the anchor bolts the contractor used weren't those called for on the plans). At some point you're trusting your builder, and this is probably one of those areas, so choose well. (This is also one of the areas where prefab becomes a factor - I've got a builder I don't necessarily love and I'm not there as much as I'd like to be, but I'm not relying on him to do nearly as much as if he were building a whole house for me.) Review as much of the technical specs as you have the stomach for with as many people as you can. I'm sure Res4 would tell you that I've asked more questions than they usually get, but there are still so many things that I don't know.

Second, there's a HUGE difference b/w drawing a house and building a house. There's a lot of standard building practice that isn't done exactly as an architect or an engineer would have it done, and at the same time there's a lot of sloppy building. It's nice for me right now to have Res4 to fall back on for a little more perspective on which is which.

Instead of sleeping in our house last night...

...we slept here:


(Notice the oversize rainfly - no repeat of our flood of last week!)

To make a very long story short, the hitch for the bulldozer to pull the house up the hill was woefully inadequate for the job. EVERYONE should have known this beforehand, and there's no excuse for it to have been discovered the morning of the set. But we're resheduled for Friday. Tomorrow we'll pull the house up the hill.

UPDATE: Of course it's POURING RAIN in WV right now, so we'll see.

Cross your fingers

We're off this morning for the set. Had a bit of rain last night, but hopefully shouldn't be a problem. Lot's of pics soon.

Res4 notes some inconsistencies b/t the engineered drawings and the actual foundation pour - we'll have to review those with the contractor today and see what sort of problems they present.

Cedar Siding

So we spent all day Thursday sanding cedar boards. We've got 5200' linear feet of 1"x4"x random length (from 6' to 20') tongue and groove clear (no knots) grade A cedar. It is gorgeous. The range of colors is striking, from blonde to deep red. (The cedar was $6600, shipping included, about $1.28/lf.) Here's our staging area:


We're using Sikkens Cetol SRD (color: natural #078; DO NOT choose the wrong color - the "cedar" color apparently turns the wood orange!), which is an oil based translucent stain that really just deepens the natural color of the wood and highlights the grain. Res4 recommends it; they've used it on lots of their homes. It costs about $30/gallon (we should use b/t 8-10 gallons). The application process requires that you sand the exterior side of the wood to a rough grit (80-100) and then apply liberally, brushing back any excess (the interior side of the wood needs a coat as well, as does each of the tongues and each of the grooves). We've sanded about half the cedar so far, and here are some boards with the stain:


Our estimate from the contractor for installation of our cedar siding was $13k (and I think it would have been higher if we'd talked through the specific details of the sanding and staining process). So we're going to save b/t $5-6k doing it ourselves, assuming all goes well.

Basement Slab and Radiant Installation

The walls are up and the slab is in. The only glitch here was the faux brick on the outside walls - not a big deal at all because we planned on parging them (a stucco-like application). But the bare concrete look is one we really like and I was thinking if it turned out ok we'd just leave it like that. But I never talked about that with the concrete guys, and the faux brick forms are SOP for them, so that's that.


The wall I was worried about turned out fine:


This is an insulation product designed for radiant installations called RAZ panels. They are 2'x4' styrofoam boards with dimples through which you run PEX loops. Our PEX is 1/2" and these boards are designed to accomodate that size. They aren't cheap ($16/panel - we needed 110), but they really made the installation of the PEX easy (no tying it to rebar) and they are supposed to be a pretty efficient way to reduce heat loss from the radiant to the ground.




PEX is supposed to be a godsend for plumbing, and I understand that new construction often gets plumbed only with PEX runs (no soldering, no joints, fewer leaks, hardly ever cracks even when the water inside freezes). But it's stiff and not the easiest stuff to run through these dimples. It came in 500' foot rolls about the dimension of a roll of garden hose (1500' for about $700). And it didn't want to give up that shape. And if you force it you can kink it, so you have to be patient. Here's what the installation of the PEX looked like:




If a professional were doing this installation, the manifold would be installed at this point in a box just like the one you see for the tub rough in (there are five loops, and the intention is that they will be able to run independent of one another). But since Craig and I are doing it ourselves and our HVAC sub will install the mechanical elements later on, this is the best we could do (this spot where all the rough plumbing and PEX pop up is where the bathroom and mechanical room abut):


Here's our concrete pour. This is 4000 lb concrete (as requested by the concrete polisher) and is reinforced with tiny strands of fiberglass, which means we don't need rebar or expansion joints (each strand of fiberglass encourages microcracks as opposed to the larger breaks you can get when a rebar slab expands and contracts). The heavier concrete with the fiberglass ended up costing just under $1k more than what we'd originally spec'd (3000 lb with rebar) but should result in a better slab.


The concrete polisher also requested that we use a mechanical trowel to finish the pour (reduces air pockets):


This is the exterior waterproofing for the foundation - DeltaMS. Once upon a time everybody used tar, then Thoroseal became pretty popular. We brushed four feet of Thoroseal on the bottom half of the walls. But I understand that with poured concrete, if the wall cracks so does the Thoroseal. So we were looking for a redundant waterproofing application, and these days there are lots of rubber membrane applications available. The difference with the product we're using is that it has dimples on the side of the membrane that faces the wall. This reduces the capillary effect of a membrane flush with the wall, and allows any water that does get in to flow down to the drain pipes. The installation went pretty quickly and the two 65' rolls and the necessary hardware (fasteners, flashing) came to about $700.


The guy in the middle here it Butch. 6'10, 340 lbs. Nice to have a guy like that around on any job site.


Here's the only real mishap of the day. This is a pic of the concrete guy wondering where in the world this (parked) pickup came from: